Welcome to the Parent Power Blog!

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4/14/2008 1:21 PM

The Parent Power Blog provides support and resources to parents with suggestions, the telling of (often humorous) experiences and a sharing of resources. We seek to ask thought-provoking questions that challenge us to think about our parenting methods, and about ways that we might improve those methods to be parents that nurture our children, support them, love them, challenge them, and encourage them to be successful in all areas of their lives. Together, we can build a strong community for our children—The Learning Community, energized by Parent Power.

In their book The Art of Roughhousing, authors Lawrence J. Cohen, PhD, and Anthony T. DeBenedet, MD, cite research that shows playing rough and tumble games with your kids is good for all of you. I don't doubt it for a second. What games does your family play?

Right now in many places around the world, life is incomprehensibly horrible. I'm very tempted to try not to think about it. But that's not the right response for me or for my family. Now is the time to discuss natural disasters and war with the kids, to rally their interest in helping others, and to encourage them to begin forming their own opinions about foreign policy.

World, you and I are going to be having a lot of these conversations. I'll be reminding you how sweet, gentle, funny, smart, innocent and absolutely wonderful she is, and ask you to be the same with her. Treat her kindly. Fill her with joy. Appreciate her for the amazing person she is. If you don't, you're gonna have a raging momma bull to deal with, and it ain't gonna be pretty.

My own response to what I heard of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother was at first outrage, but as I learned more, the outrage waned and I've spent the last several weeks looking at my own parenting style and discussing the book with others.

As is so often the case, discrimination often doesn't become a cause of ours until we've been discriminated against. I guess I am now going to be teaching my kids that old doesn't mean irrelevant, incapable, or incompetent...it means wiser. With the amount of gray sprouting out of my scalp, I am very wise indeed.